💾 Archived View for gerikson.com › gemlog › gemini-sux › Re-emphasis.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 15:37:49. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-03-01)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This is a refreshing take
Gemini Spec compliance - my anarchist take
OK so this kinda blew up.
my post cheekily arguing for Sperrsatz
There’s been some chatter about this in the newsgroup, subscribe and like!
I found this “thread” by Pen:
⤴ Emphasis: rewriting the sentence is preferable
⤴ 2020-12-02 Gemini emphasis
Note that in the 3rd entry Sperrsatz is proposed, with U+202F as a separator between letters. So great minds think alike.
And today, Idiomdrotting writes:
More on that below.
I’ve been missing emphasis (*italics*, __bold__ and `monospace`) since day 1 on Gemini. I still think their exclusion is a cop-out.
Quoting the FAQ
2.9 Why didn’t you just use Markdown instead of defining text/gemini?
* There are actually many subtly different and incompatible variants of Markdown in existence, so unlike TLS all the different libraries are not guaranteed to behave similarly.
CommonMark exists and has a test suite etc. While not a finished standard, at least it’s trying to create one.
A strict subset of Markdown (for example, eliminating the 2 line header format, disallowing images and tables, and standardizing on asterisk for italics and double underscore for bold) would have been eminently feasible imho.
Also section 2.10
Because text/gemini is an entirely new format defined from scratch for Gemini, client authors will typically need to write their own code to parse and render the format from scratch, without being able to rely on a pre-existing, well-tested library implementation. Therefore, it is important that the format is extremely simple to handle correctly.
This ties into my old observation that Gemini is optimized for the drive-by developer who doesn’t want to stay and expand in the protocol. But that’s not really relevant
__BECAUSE__ I am not proposing changing the spec. That way madness and a very angry Drew DeVault lies.
I propose client implementers formally or informally agree to parse Markdown-like text styling syntax, if the user so wishes.
Perhaps a new extended mime-type is needed, I dunno.
Both Pen and Idiomdrotting propose this. Pen quotes the Modern Language Association, discouraging the use of italics in *academic texts*[1]
https://style.mla.org/italics-for-emphasis/
The problem is that from the very page there’s a link on how to cite works, which recommends italics for titles. Oops.
https://style.mla.org/works-cited/citations-by-format/
Most of my blog output is book reviews, I’d like to use italics to reference books, but that’s not possible in gemtext.
It’s not all about *drama* and __SHOUTING__. Emphasis has legitimate use cases in (English) prose - if nothing else for correctly quoting other works.
Clients should take the lead here.
The protocol can be left alone.
This has been fun, but I’ll drop my engagement about this - for now.
—-
[1] I don’t recall Gemini being restricted to academic texts but that’s neither here nor there.
────────────────────────────────────────────
→ more posts in the ‹gemini-sux› category
About this category: “All that is wrong with Gemini, or your money back”
Copyright © 2018 - 2022 Gustaf Erikson
[This Page Viewed Best In Any Gemini Client]